drink.good.wine

both your body & the earth will thank you.

drink.good.wine. It’s as simple as paying attention to the food we eat. In Vermont, food awareness is something that almost everyone seems to care about, and for a good reason. Why put unnecessary chemicals in your body if you can avoid it? The same goes with wine! Did you know there are over 50 different additives allowed in wine? Sulphur, chemically created yeast, purple dye, even fish guts which are used to attract particulates in a process called fining. Egg whites also used for fining, and sugar used to aid in the fermentation process of making alcohol. It sounds a little more like baking cookies, but worse. What's particularly interesting about all this is that the more of these additives that are put in the wine, the less actual wine is in the bottle! When you sit down to a nice farm to table dinner, don’t you want to have wine that comes from a place using the same philosophy? So why not start drinking wine that you know has been minimally intervened. You may think it’s more expensive. It’s not! We have very minimally manipulated wines starting at $13 a bottle.

In response to this, we are aligning ourselves with the positive conscious trend in Vermont to eat local and organic food with the creation a wine campaign: drink.good.wine. The idea is to help open eyes and minds to new wines by educating consumers about where wines come from and how they are made. We have picked several criteria that can help you recognize wines that are produced in a naturally. While not all the wines will satisfy all of the criteria, even one of the 8 is a step in the right direction.

The criteria include:

organic

biodynamic

sustainable

family-owned

unfiltered

unfined/vegan

indigenous yeast

no added sulphur.

It is important to mention that wines that have been added to are not necessarily bad. There are good reasons why some winemakers choose to use certain additives. In particular, wines that travel across the ocean can become unstable without sulphur added. This can result in inconsistent wine from bottle to bottle. Using certain additives can also ensure that your product is consistent from year to year from a flavor profile. Who are we to say that one is worse than the other, but if you consider where your meat and veggies come from, why not know a little more about where your wine is coming from?